THE DISPERSION OF LA TIN-CA THOLIC EDUCA TION 245
The Franciscans were the most energetic and effective in this educational mission
during the first half of the sixteenth century. Three Flemish Franciscans began the
first concentrated educational effort in New Spain when they arrived in 1522 shortly
after Cortes had conquered the Aztecs. Peter of Ghent established the first school for
Indian children, concentrating upon the sons of caciques but admitting lower class
Indian boys as well. The most famous of the early schools was the Colegio de San
Francisco in Mexico City which taught Latin, religion, music, painting, and sculpture,
and some vocational arts and crafts.
The next year, 1523, twelve Spanish Franciscans arrived in Mexico, fresh from
the humanist training they had received in Spain which was then imbued with the
spirit of Renaissance reform being preached by Erasmus in the name of Christian
humanism. These reforms, promoted by Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros, were sweeping
through the Universities of Salamanca5 Valladolid, and the new University of Alcala de
Henares. They included the Erasmian doctrine that just as the pagans of classical Rome
achieved greatness without Christianity the Europe of his day could be so much
greater if it really lived up to its Christian ideals. The Franciscans in their reform
applied the same line of thinking to the Amerindians whose capability for greatness,
they said, could only be genuinely realized through the civilizing influence of a
purified and reformed Christianity. It was something of this Renaissance spirit of
classical humanist Christianity that imbued the reformed branches of Franciscan friars,
the Observants or Friars Minor. Their university study of the classical languages as well
as Spanish gave them a mind-set of interest in the Amerindian languages and cultures
which they began to study and compile into grammars, dictionaries, and histories after
their arrival in America. One of the principal promoters of Erasmian humanism was
the Franciscan bishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumarraga, who naturally enough en-
couraged humanistic education for Amerindians as well as for Spaniards.
One of the principal beneficiaries of Zumarraga's interest was the Colegio de
Santa Cruz founded in Mexico City under Franciscan auspices in 1535-1536. More
humanistic and academic and less vocationally oriented than Peter of Ghent's school,
the Colegio de Santa Cruz stressed Latin grammar, logic, rhetoric, and philosophy as
well as music and religion. Designed primarily to produce a mature elite for church and
state, its graduates, who could converse in Latin, assisted in translating the Christian
scriptures into Amerindian languages.
Other mendicant friars appeared on the scene in Mexico, Dominicans in 1526,
Augustinians in 1533. By 1559 there were some eighty Franciscan friaries with 380
members, forty Dominican with 210 members, and forty Augustinian with like
membership. They all regularly conducted primary schools for Indian children in or
near their friaries, some of these schools dealing with 300 or 400 to 1,000 pupils. A
third major secondary school was established in 1548 by the Franciscans, the Colegio
de San Juan de Letran, aimed primarily at mestizo boys. The crowning educational
achievement in New Spain was the establishment of the University of Mexico in 1551
(operational in 1553) which took the University of Salamanca as its model; it even
blazed new paths by opening its doors to mestizos and offering courses in Amerindian
languages and culture.
Christian humanism, however, suffered major setbacks in Spain, where it soon